Migration planning and operations for a data storage system involve coordination of activities that may take weeks or months to complete and use large amounts of computing resources. Event windows used in migration planning include a collection of migration events in a particular time frame and using particular asset configuration. An event window can contain multiple point in time snapshots. A “snapshot” is a representation of a state of a system at a particular point in time.
The use of event windows and snapshots in migration planning operations facilitates the planning of a data storage system as the system goes through different states during a set of configuration changes. It is to be understood that a data storage system may be part of a datacenter. Event windows and snapshots allow an administrator of the datacenter to update the configuration of the data storage system at multiple points in time. The ability to simulate a change to a representation of the datacenter (or data storage center) is referred to as modeling, while actually implementing a change to the datacenter is referred to as migration. For example, an administrator can model what a datacenter would look like given a proposed change to certain resources of a data storage system, while the actual implementation of the resource change would be considered a migration.
When planning a migration, known processes for making configuration changes typically require a user to wait until a new element is delivered before starting a configuration, resulting in increased time on site completing required configuration changes, an increased number of unplanned configuration changes, and a higher risk of unexpected configuration changes.
Event windows provide mechanisms to plan the processes for the configuration changes. However, there is a need for improvement of the event windows to be applicable to multiple types of migration and to enable more expansive changes in workflows for migration planning that can be conducted offsite before an element is delivered, so as to reduce the number of unexpected configuration changes, resulting in improved planning, and a reduction in the time on site completing the required configuration changes.